Month: March 2018

An occult war wages between the striving for the grand unification of all things and the insurgency that haunts its every Promethean feat. One side of this conflict takes as its ground universality, stability, linearity, and homeostasis its, while its opponent is an unground of swarming differentiation, unpredictability, non-linearity, and positive feedback. The former is the top-down view and the latter is bottom-up self-organization. The first is the One, the second a multitudinous Zero – the secondary process that thinks itself primary, and the primary process itself. Flat planes and the multi-scaled. The desire for perfect operativity and the forces that induce its downfall.

At the summit of modernity the nature of this occult war becomes profoundly cybernetic (which means that it always already as so). Tiqqun argued in “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” that the systems of domination and exploitation were evolving towards an unending managerialism based upon openness, ecological thinking, globalist progressivism, horizontalist ethos and cybernetic control – a clever camouflage for the Atlanteans. Tiqqun, at length:

Cybernetics is the police-like thinking of the Empire, entirely animated by an offensive concept of politics, both in an historical and metaphysical sense. It is now completing its integration of the techniques of individuation — or separation — and totalization that had been developing separately: normalization, “anatomo-politics,” and regulation, “bio-politics,” as Foucault calls it. I call his “techniques of separation” the police of qualities. And, following Lukács, I call his “techniques of totalization” the social production of society. With cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the production of collective totalities work together like gears to replicate History in the form of a feigned movementof evolution. It acts out the fantasy of a Same that always manages to integrate the Other; as one cybernetician puts it, “all real integration is based on a prior differentiation.” In this regard, doubtless no one could put it better than the “automaton” Abraham Moles, cybernetics’ most zealous French ideologue, who here expresses this unparalleled murder impulse that drives cybernetics: “We envision that one global society, one State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social mechanisms.” Cybernetics is war against all that lives and all that is lasting.

While fundamentally correct in the tracing of the contours of particular managerial tendencies (one that aims to culminate in a democratic “social capitalism” which is indistinguishable from an eco-minded “third way socialism”), Tiqqun errs by throwing out the cybernetic baby with the bathwater, and in doing so misses the depths and scope of the war. It remains relegated to level where one on side is the humanist bourgeoisie and their cybernetic ‘toolbox’, and on the other is “Imaginary Party” that swells in the cracks and crevices of this system. Insofar as such a dichotomy can be upheld – which isn’t apparent at all – it is intrinsically problematized by the imperceptible matrix that roars beneath it and even gives rise to it.

No sooner than cybernetics had arrived amidst a fanfare celebrating the optimization of control did a new,frightening conflict break out, as Peter Galison analyzed in his “The Ontology of the Enemy”. The opponent in this deadly game was a “cold-blooded, machinelike opponent. This was the enemy not of bayonet struggles in the trenches, nor of architectural targets fixed through the prism of a Norden gunsight. Rather, it was a mechanized Enemy Other, generated in the laboratory-based science wars of MIT and a myriad of universities around the United States and Britain…” In its genesis the cybernetic sciences were about gaining technological superiority over opponents in the face of faster and faster speeds, which escalating quickly into a mutational program that blurred the distinction between the human and the machine. Genesis turns towards the holy war: “in a final move of totalization, [Norbert] Wiener vaulted cybernetics to a philosophy of nature” in the form of a permanent and boundlessness war between stability and safety and the “Augustinian devil”, the unknowing and unknown “’evil’ of chance and disorder”.

While subsequent developments in the realm of cybernetics, particularly as it moved its second-order phase up through general systems theory into complexity theory (of which much more will be said momentarily) transformed this basic Manichean conflict by recognizing the role of chance, disorder and noise in making systems evolutionary and transformative, the ontological conservatism that whispers through Wiener’s writings is reflected in the widespread resistance to evolutionary transformation. Top-down order is predicated on the ubiquity and prowess of human-led production. An entangling inhuman auto-production that nests this production cannot be be seen as but a threat. That the cybernetic paradigm ruptured the distinction between the human and the machine by articulating the baseline functioning of each in teleological circular causality made the machines uncanny by giving them the attributes of agency and intelligence. Wiener found in the gremlin that haunted aircrafts during the war an earlier preamble to this uncanny collapse:

The semi-humorous superstition of the gremlin among the aviators was probably due, as much as anything else, to the habit of dealing with a machine with a large number of built-in feedbacks which might be interpreted as friendly or hostile. For example the wings of an airplane are deliberately built in such a manner as to stabilize the plane, and this stabilization, which is of the nature of a feedback … may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized when the plane is forced into unusual maneuvers. (quoted in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy”)

In the wake of World War 2, Carl Schmitt famously turned his attention to famously turned his attention to the idea of juridical order as the Katechon. With its origins in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the concept of the Katechon became prominent in the Middle Ages to describe a force that restraints the Antichrist, and by so effectively holds the apocalypse itself at bay. In Schmitt’s political theology it carried the same function – but it is not simply a singular apocalypse. It is a history of apocalypses, of grand imperial ambitions that acted as Katechons by forestalling their end until, at last, the empires rots and rays, its thread disentangling and separating as another Katechon rises on the horizon. From Byzantine Empires to the Third Reich to the United States, an oscillating history of imperial ruin and passage.

Much ink and paper have been spilled and spent trying to determine what precisely the Schmittian Antichrist is . Interestingly, the Katechon at times depicted is as a decelerator that slows the pace of world history; it would follow, then, that the Antichrist can be found as an affiliate of the quickening pace – an accelerator, even. This often remains lodged at the political level: he describes the Third Reich, for instance, as an accelerator of world history that is opposed by the decelerator of the United States. But the laws of state decay and means-end reversal prevail, and the US would itself become the new accelerator. There are, however, other ways of articulating the Antichrist. John McCormick argues that, running through Schmitt’s intellectual evolution from the 1910s to the postwar era, an understanding of technology and economics as a malevolent Antichrist that cunningly infiltrates the political arena and bring with it ruin:

Just as the Antichrist seems to deliver salvation and eternal peace, on the contrary, only to actually bring destruction and despair, technology and commercialism promise a heaven on earth but bring only a worse form of impoverishment and devastation, which may not even be readily recognized as such. One of the characteristics of modern technology is that it can mechanically reproduce virtually anything. Schmitt plays on this theme of reproduction with the image of the Antichrist. If one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, then what can be distinguished? Everything becomes the same. Everything is neutralized. The Antichrist/technology is described as “uncanny [unheimlich]” because of the epistemological uncertainty involved in deciphering precisely what it is. It simulates the familiar and authentic, but is it? The very nature of what real is, is called into question in the age of technology. According to Schmitt, “The confusion becomes unspeakable”. (John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology, 88-89)

As Mark Fisher relentlessly illustrated, the cybernetic revolution, by lending to technological systems a certain intelligence and sense of agency, fulfilled the long-held Gothic dread of the living automaton. Schmitt here taps into this underground current, one that connects the myth of the Golem, Marx’s undead capital, Frankstein’s monster, and the gremlins haunting aircrafts engaged in wartime missions. An echo can be heard, one no doubt unintentional (but no less telling) between Wiener’s Manichean cybernetic conflict of organization and its enemy, the Augustinian devil of disorder, and Schmitt’s own definition of the political as what arises from the friend/enemy distinction. For McCormick, the relationship between the dichotomy of friend/enemy and Christ/Antichrist is clear: traveling above the political as an abstract order and looking down into it, the Antichrist is the absolute Enemy that threatens to undermine the political as a category writ large. Throw this insight into jagged alignment with the cybernetic uncanny and the Antichrist, the schizophrenic god Baphoment, becomes what Deleuze and Guattari described as the Gothic Line, or, in its more common guise, the machinic phylum.

At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature… Vital impulse? Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents. There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla. (A Thousand Plateaus 406-407)

The human and the machine, the orchid in the wasp: unilateral agency dissolves away in the face of the phylum, and as such can only be viewed by the political as the Enemy, even if it to approach the relation in such a manner is extremely vulgar (after all, do Deleuze and Guattari not make it the itinerants who follow the phylum, figures who are outside the reach of the State, but on who the State depends on survival?) To reach the level of phylum we’ll have had to pass from the basic loops of Wiener’s first-order cybernetics to arrive at the imperceptible matrix, the staggering sum of immanent self-organizing processes. In this mesh, the political, the state, Christ, the Atlantean continuum, all can be understood as a elements internal to these processes, no different than Deleuze and Guattari’s self that mistakes itself to be unitary whilst being but something that has congealed to the side of the auto-productive processes: a voided coagulation that thinks itself not. The unwavering stability of this creation, held together by the Judgment of God, is countered by emergent flux of the phylum.

A Lemurian insurgency, even if the things that the flux produces – commerce and technology, namely – sustain the State. The fact of the matter is that the singular instantiation of something from a catalytic process will never be stable, and is part of line that intrinsically escapes. The Katechon is sinking.

Virilio unpacks the permanent state of emergency in Speed and Politics (the framing of deterrence and speed no doubt influenced Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the global smooth space in A Thousand Plateaus):

The term “deterrence” points to the ambiguity of this situation, in which the weapon replaces the protection of armor, in which the possibilities of offense and offensive ensure in and of themselves the defense, the entire defensive against the “explosive” dimension of strategic arms, but not at all against the “implosive” dimension of the vectors’ performances, since on the contrary the maintenance of a credible “strike power” requires the constant refining of the engines’ power, in other words of their ability to reduce geographic space to nothing or almost nothing

In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating destruction) will not limit strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone still allows us to gain fractions of seconds, which gain is indispensable”to any freedom of action. As General Fuller wrote, “When the combatants threw javelins at each other, the weapon’s initial speed was such that one could see it on its trajectory and parry its effects with one’s shield. But when the javelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible.” Impossible to move one’s body out of the way, but possible if one moved out of the weapon’s range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield-possible, in other words, through space and matter.

Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the supersonic speeds of assault leaves so little time for detection, identification and response that in the case of a surprise attack the supreme authority would have to risk abandoning his supremacy of decision by authorizing the lowest echelon of the defense system to immediately launch anti-missile missiles. The two political superpowers have thus far preferred to avoid this situation through negotiations, renouncing anti-missile defense at the same time. Given the lack of space, an active defense requires at least the material time to intervene. But these are the “war materials” that disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaton powers of nuclear weapons than in a series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically effective for at least a little while longer, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vector by constantly improving its performances has now totally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen.

General Ailleret points this out in his history of weapons by stating that the definition of arms programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a “field. ” The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier. (152-153

On Twitter, John Doe’s Carnival of Error writes that it has “become clear any Gnon-centered approach to power must be accompanied by an anarchist ontology in some way.” I certainly agree, though with a slight modification of terminology: any anarchic approach to power must be accompanied by a Gnon-ontology in some way. Gnon, as the Great Propeller, already holds great affinity with the anarchic outside, to point even in which the difference between the two seems nil. The question of power intersects here in two different ways, the nuances and internal connections of which are need of greater elucidation and interrogation. The first intersection is in the context of political power: as an immense struggle unfolding in the great void, the anarchic is the political’s a priori, to which it is permanently wed. The second is in the manifestation(s) of non-political power, which (on the surface, at least) cuts sharply towards the Outside by want of its own logic. It is, then, another mask of the anarchic. Upon each of these the final determination unfolds as the asovereign exception.

Another thread that crossed into similar territory began with on the topic of whether or not civil war is imminent (a topic for a future post!) and ended on the question of whether or not a unipolar global order is an open possibility for the future. From the U/Accist perspective here (or is something like a gamble more proper?), the position that is staked out in this debate is on the supreme unlikelihood technocratic unipolarity. To summarize as briefly as possible: highly centralized, vertical power systems are doomed and their capacities will into squeezed into tinier and tinier blocs – or patches – as the involutionary curve of spiral temporality auto-tightens. This isn’t to say that the existing sovereign units won’t be undergo intensive development and become zones of runaway growth and innovation – quite the opposite! The kicker is that the happenings in such spaces will, along with despatialized counterparts, be conduits for the tightening gyre itself feeding into itself.

Regardless, it’s an excellent thought experiment, and one that demands to be thought-through. The implications for anarchy are clear: if unipolarity was achieved it would be a sovereign operating above all other sovereigns, and the void of anarchy would be squeezed into nonexistence. To pull off this defeat would entail nothing short of the Promethean overcoming of Gnon, ushering in Scott Alexander’s Age of Elua.

A cosmic reign of Elua would be nice; it is, after all, the imaginal zone where the most utopian of socialist currents and libertarian transhumanism bend and connect. At the conceptual summit it comes down to the classic friendly artificial intelligence vs. malevolent artificial intelligence debate. Anything short of that and it is a matter of a planned and perfectly-executed upon convergence upon the smooth, perfect functioning of a system designed to achieve these goals.

The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production. The “physical production sphere” itself has become far less capital-intensive. If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution in garage and desktop production tools promises an analogous effect almost as great on many kinds of manufacturing. The radical reduction in the cost of machinery required for many kinds of manufacturing has eroded Stallman’s distinction between “free speech” and “free beer.” Or as Chris Anderson put it, “Atoms would like to be free, too, but they’re not so pushy about it.” (Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, 220)

to this?

Soon, no doubt, there will be a 3D printer in every home and social robots may well be providing the vigilant company to the elderly who live alone. The present machines,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Book of Machines, “are to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress.” Technology is plotting its own evolution and the purely human advantage is becoming increasingly small. New fusions and adaptions between the organic and the near organic continue. Silicon, once sand, the second most common element built into the earth’s crust, carries deep with in it an ironic reminder of our own amphibious evolutionary past. Our roots, as cybernetic organisms, come from the same source. Though we are often blind to the machines that surround us – technology is the ocean within which we swim – these exchanges and interactions fuel us. As evolutionary beings, we are willing participants, hungry to transform.

In Shenzhen companies, factories and markets are adjusting to the new products and modes of manufacturing that they bring. A realization is dawning. The age of the copy is over. It is time tomutate. (Anna Greenspan and Suzanne Livingston, Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai, and the Evolution of the Species)

Old Nick chimes in to fill some gaps and provide some speculation on the height on this tendency: the convergence of miniaturizing manufacturing technology towards a “self-replicating symbiotically assembled Universal Constructor“.

The despatialized patch: or, as it has been called by its actually-existing practitioners, a phyle. The question of despatialized patches becomes foregrounded by multiple factors, the most obvious of which is that in the 21st century there is not necessarily any correlations between community and territorial clustering. Not even that ephemeral force that organized itself through reiterating engagements in a shared environment – tradition – is locked in place by the ground from which it emerged. Solid into air, value into information. On the far side of this trend is subscription governance that, unlike fixed neocam models, can be plugged into anywhere in the world. One only needs to look in the direction of Estonia’s ongoing experiments with e-governance to reach this stage (or, from another direction, the recognition that there’s nary a government service that isn’t also provided for on the open market, and it is only a matter of time before the package deal rears its head. Government, by Amazon).

The term phyle has its roots in Neal Stephenson’s (post)cyberpunk novel The Diamond Age, and describes national, ethnic, and ‘synthetic’ networks of governance and commerce that operate globally. Coexistence with city-states, the phyles maintain certain territorial ‘enclaves’ where business enterprises internal to the network set up shop, which in turn supports the functioning of the phyle itself. In many respects Stephenson’s vision comes close to Rizome, the transnationally-networked corporation in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, which also exhibited a kind of decentralist organizational dynamic that has been described by Kevin Carson, in The Desktop Regulatory State, as ‘platform support structures’. Sterling suggested that the Rizome organizational system be likened to the structures of Japanese feudalism, while Stephenson’s phyles akin to the Venetian merchant guilds. Time-tangling, it seems, is utterly ubiquitous, and when we consider that the fictional depiction of the phyle directly informs the real-life experimentation, it’s clear that something very weird is happening. A hyperstitional thread, however, is probably best left for another time…

Las Indias is a ‘neo-Venetian’ phyle organized by a collective that came together in the Spanish cyberpunk scene of the 1990s. Contra the voiceless structure of Moldbuggian neocameralism, Las Indias articulates itself as an ‘economic democracy’ boasting a heavy focus on community, fraternity, and shared experience: a social “common metabolism’ that is conjoined to a “single economic metabolism”. According to David de Ugarte, one of the chief brains behind the project, these intertwined metabolisms produce an architecture that synthesizes an understanding of the phyle as both a “micro-country without territory” and a “kind of local economy”: the transnational network and the localized, spatial support structures. Out from these conduits flows product and services, and in flows capital and goods.

de Ugarte notes that while the neo-Venetian ethic of Las Indias bends towards the democratic, this isn’t the only path for the phyle:

The Murides, the old pacifist Sufis from Senegal, went from having a nationalist dis- course and growing peanuts to constituting a community trade network with two million members that spreads from South Africa to Italy. Its transformation isn’t over yet, but the young Murides have turned the daïras, the old Koranic schools, into urban communes that are also business cells.

At first blush, nothing could be farther apart than cyberpunks and the Murides. But the parallelism is significant: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness. They are phyles.

Phyles may function democratically and be cooperative-based, as in the case of the Indianos, or else they may have a small-business structure and even a religiously inspired ideology, as in the case of the Murides. But they share two key elements: they possess a transnational identity, and they subordinate their companies to personal and community needs.

Phyles are “order attractors” in a domain which states cannot reach conceptually and in areas that states increasingly leave in the dark: phyles invest in social cohesion, sometimes even creating infrastructures, providing grants and training, and having their own NGOs. Transnational thinking allows them to access the new globalised business before anyone else. A phyle’s investment portfolio may range from renewable energies to PMCs, from free software initiatives to credit cooperatives. Their bet is based on two ideas. First: transnational is more powerful than international. Second: in a global market the community is more resilient than the “classic” capitalist company.

Commentary from others in the P2P ‘movement’ had pushed back a little on certain aspects of Las Indias’s presentation of the phyle: drawing on some the same historical precedents cited by de Ugarte (namely: merchant guilds), Poor Richard challenges the formula that “community precedes enterprise”:

A guild can function just as envisioned for a phyle (from Greek phulē — tribe, clan) but does not carry the same connotation as a tribe, clan, or phyle of having a primary basis in familial kinship, nor the historical reputation (in certain cases) of rebellion against central authority. The subtle but important difference is that a guild is all about practical know-how and about taking care of business– not about ideology or revolution (eh, at least on the surface…).

Typically a guild (German: Gilde) is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. In the most general sense a guild is simply an organization of persons (peers) with related interests, goals, etc., especially one formed for mutual aid or protection. Historically guilds were any of various medieval associations, as of merchants or artisans, organized to maintain standards and to protect the interests of their members.

[…]

One point on which I think guilds differ from Las Indias’ conception of phyles (“In Phyles, Community precedes Enterprise” -David Uguarte) is that for guilds, community and enterprise are two sides of one coin. I think this fits well with p2p culture while also being relatively non-confrontational with mainstream corporate/capitalist norms. The ability of guilds and leagues (such as the League of Women Voters) to present a relatively “normal” outward face, may have occasional tactical advantages.

Leaping off from this conversation, we might say that the phyle is a diagonalization between two different forms of organization: the guild and the networked tribe. There has been quite murmurs and active experimentation with neo-guild models over the last two decades, but the figure of the tribe itself – as perhaps a more abstract organizational system than either the guild or the phyle – permeate the emergent world. Extrapolate from trends in cultural fragmentation and miniaturization of production technology, and McLuhan’s dictum that electronic communicaton exerts a “tribalizing effect” nestles itself up against everything from the (arguably templex) tribalist dreams emanating from certain anarchist quarters as well as DIY networks, to insurgent hacker tribes, among other examples.

Speaking of tribes and time loops, here’s John Robb, circa 2005. While written only a year into the US’s disastrous adventure in Iraq, this seems like it may very well be more relevant today:

The tribalism we face today is a combination of these ancient mindsets and modern systems thinking (economics, networks, communication, etc.). It’s a very dangerous combination made stronger by the forces of globalization — which has levelled the playing field in the competition between tribes and states. Today, networked tribes thrive economically (particularly as participants in the multi-trillion dollar black economy) and project power globally:

In Iraq, we don’t face a single tribe (either traditional or manufactured). We face dozens. Wholesale systems disruption and violence has forced great many people (particularly young men) into tribal organizations for economic support and defense — a pattern we see repeated in other failed states.

In Afghanistan, we see tribes in control of most of the country as well as a multi-billion dollar opium industry.

Globally we see rapidly growing manufactured tribes like the Mara Salvatrucha (already over 700,000 strong) and al Qaeda in open war with states. The appeal of these tribes — the sense of belonging they represent — transcends borders. It is able to motivate young men in the UK and Honduras to undertake acts of extreme violence in the hope of gaining membership.

Until we understand the moral bonds of networked tribalism, there is little hope that we will morally defeat it.

From the U/Acc point of view of this blog, the idea of the moral defeat of such things seem like a woefully antiquated concept, as is the issue is not, at the ultimate unground, a question of moral determination or a sense of operational agency.

More mill-grist:

The Cyborg Nomad on Bit-Nations and Sovereign Services, charting out the intersection of extreme deterritorialization and the spatial boundaries of the Neocam model. Such things have relevance to the aforementioned organizational dynamics of the Neo-Venetian model.

Cockydooody on the Tankie Patchwork in Dontesk. Networked tribalism in pursuit of breakaway republics fosters what appears to be the opening chasm to unending war defined by the alchemical mixture of red and brown political ideologies. The “harsh exit”: “Neo-Soviet-Eastern-Orthodox-Eurasianist-Fascism-Communism”

Xenogoth on Bifo and the ‘Global Civil War’. A very poignant moment is the reflection on the possibility that resistance to geopolitical fragmentation may very well be “exacerbating mental disintegration”. The specter of antipraxis lurks in Bifo’s reflections, to boot.

A great new post series is in the works by Xenogoth, pushing out from the reflections on state decay to The Gothic Secession of Yorkshire. Reprising the fallout of early posts on the topic, they write:

Following my previous post on patchwork, ‘State Decay’, which tentatively introduced the idea and explored why it is something that the Left should take more seriously, I was repeatedly challenged over the legitimacy of patchwork being anything more than “science fiction”.

The difficulty in addressing this is, of course, that theories of patchwork are inherently speculative, but if we are to jettison the use of our imaginations when addressing the future, what point is there to thinking (about it) at all?

To me, this line of criticism felt like a blatant instantiation of the Left’s consistent inability to dig itself out of the “capitalist realist” fallacy that Mark Fisher so famously described in his book of (roughly) the same name.

This is a really cool way of thinking about it, and raises interesting questions with regard to certain retroprogressive elements in leftism, i.e. because there appears to be no alternative, and in response the Left only looks backwards. There’s always tools and forgotten histories and whatnot in the past to be found that can be resurrected, but if this comes at the expense of thinking-through future-oriented trendlines then the backwards face only serves to reinforce the initial condition of capitalist realism.

Either way, this made me think about the brief appearance of capitalist realism in Flatline Constructs, which is still occupying a major spot of my headspace. It occurs in a lengthy conversation about Freud on the double and Baudrillard’s response in Symbolic Exchange and Death (maybe the connection is further enforced in my mind by the fact that this conversation takes place to unpack the Uncanny, and which Xenogoth sees as something active in the concept of patchwork itself – “Patchwork is, in this way, for me, an eerie politic.”):

The destruction of the double goes hand in hand with the production of the (Christian) soul (the ultimate achievement of the “spiritualist” project), the rise of “psychological and psychoanalytic interpretation” as the authorized forms of capitalist realism bring an end to “the primitive double”. “Shadow, specter, reflection, image”, the primitive double haunts post-monotheistic, psychoanalytic culture, which appropriates it as a “crude prefiguration of the soul”. Yet “soul and consciousness have everything to do with a principle of the subject’s unification, and nothing to do with the primitive double. On the contrary, the historical advent of the ‘soul’ puts an end to the proliferating exchange with spirits and doubles which, as a direct consequence, gives rise to another figure of the double, wending its way beneath the surfaces of western reason.” This – modern, western – double is inextricably connected with alienation; it is the double as lost part of the self, “a fantastic ectoplasm, an archaic resurgence issuing from guilt and the depths of the unconscious.”

These reflections, addressing psychoanalytic consolidation of the unitary self and matters of spirit and soul, might seem to be at an immense distance from the conversations concerning patchwork – which is, ostensibly, a theory of metapolitics, belonging to a different set of scales. But is Fisher not right in saying that, as fantastical as it seems, this line of inquiry plunges us into the depths of capitalist realism’s functions? In the destruction of the primitive double, the wild chains of proliferating difference are cut off; one no longer enters into transit and trade with figures on the outside, but turns inwards to operate under the sway of predetermined sets of options that are each flush with a particular unifying logic. The double begins in multiplicity and ends unified and coded.

Baudrillard, like Deleuze, was a shrewd reader of Klossowski, and the influence radiates through the conversation about the double. Klossowski approached the concept through the simulacrum, which for Klossowski appears in European culture under the figure of the demon so feared by those of the Church. Baudrillard, by way of Fisher: Freud’s psychological flattening of the double “is what kills off the proliferation of doubles and spirits, consigning them once to the spectral, embryonic corridors of unconscious folklore, like the ancient gods that Christianity vertefeult, that is, transformed into demons.” For Klossowski, the Church had killedthe ancient gods, but only to resurrect them as the demonic pantheon that their own holy order was tasked with holding at bay – a swarming apocalypse warded off by the Katechon. This, however, had unintended consequences: the demons did not annihilate the tracings of paganistic delirium, of mad communion with spirits, contagion and possession – the very presence of the demon was a portal between the unitary, sanctified world and the repressed Outside.

If Baudrillard finds Freud and the Church carrying out the same function, it’s because what is being repressed in this cycle (destruction of the old gods → their resurrection as demons → warding off the demonic) are impulses, which correspond precisely to what Nietzsche called the “vast confusion of contradictory drives” that are contained within ourselves. For Klossowski, they are primordial and noncommunicable intensities, just as in Deleuze’s own philosophy. The impulses ‘flicker’ through differential sequences, giving rise to to the phantasm – the self produced through synthesis and that is blind to the impulses that uphold it. Insofar as we can describe capitalist realism through these terms, it is a mode of suppressing the interplay of impulses in order to stabilize a particular phantasm in place – what Klossowski would describe as the production of series of stereotypes.

(A brief detour: it is perhaps here, in secular institutions repeating repression and molding of impulses, that we reach a perhaps more constructive vision of what neoreaction has designated the Cathedral. With CCRU’s writings in mind, we can think of the demonic impulses in relation to the Lemurian insurgency that the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton, the Human Security System, wages war with across time – and as Land writes in Dark Techno-Commercialism, “the Cathedral culminates in the Human Security System, outmatched and defeated from the Outside”. To put the concepts of the Cathedral and capitalist realism together might produce some interesting offspring.)

Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense:

The order of God includes the following elements: the identity of God as the ultimate foundation; the identity of the world as the ambient environment; the identity of the person as a well-founded agency; the identity of bodies as the base; and finally, the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else. But this order of God is constructed against another order, and this order subsists in God and weakens him little by little.

This weakening of God reaches critical mass in Klossowski’s novel The Baphoment, which depicts the Templar Order tending to, under the guidance of God, the spirits of the dead. Released from their bodies in death, these spirits must be prevented from slipping into obscene mixtures in preparation for the eventual Resurrection – but a rebellion against the divine order takes place, heralded by Saint Theresa. The eventuality of divine Resurrection is shattered as spirits escape more and more, entering into strange arrangements, multiple spirits in one body, free to engage in acts deemed profane and perverse by the holy order.

This marks, Deleuze writes, “the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of language now only expressed in intensities.” A point-by-point opposition to the order of God: the order of the Anti-Christ, analogous exactly to the warded-off demonic world and the zone of the repressed primitive double. Or, to bring it back up to the top, something beyond capitalist realism.

What does this have to do with patchwork?

In The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, Klossowski’s counterposing of the order of God and the order of the Anti-Christ informs a transformation of Kant’s arguments on the disjunctive syllogism. Kant takes the syllogism to its limit: at the ceiling of the ideal, this is the function of God, as the very ground of the ability to reason. The judgment of God that Artaud wished to have done with: the logic of either/or, this not that, not A therefore B, etc. “God is here, at least provisionally”, says Deleuze in the Logic of Sense, “deprived of his traditional claims.” He now “has a humble task, namely, to enact disjunctions”. God is thus weaker in the Kantian schema, but in the end becomes the determining factor by serving as the master of the disjunctive syllogism.

Deleuze sounds the trumpets for Klossowski and his demonic army of impulses, spirits and intensities: “it is not God but rather the Antichrist who is the master of the disjunctive syllogism. This is because the anti-God determines the passage of each thing through all of its possible predicates. God, as the Being of beings, is replaced by the Baphomet, the ‘prince of all modifications,’ and himself modification of all modifications.” Or, to put it in the more understandable (!!) language of Anti-Oedipus: the disjunctive is a synthesis of which there are two uses, a positive use and a negative use. The negative use of the disjunctive synthesis is the order of God, based on a limitation and exclusion. You are either this or that, lest catastrophe befall you. Oedipal coding, to which is opposed the positive use, reigned over by the Antichrist, a “schizophrenic God [who] has so little to do with the god of religion, even though they are related to the same syllogism”. There is no longer simply “either/or”; it has passed to “either… or… or… or…”, potentially ad infinitum.

If we situate ourselves on a transcendent sofa in the anarchic outside and peek in it becomes apparent that this follows the perverse logic of patchwork: capitalist realism, the Human Security System, what have you, manifests the negative use of the disjunctive synthesis, while patchwork – stripped down to its most basic core, which is a meta-systemic multiplication of systems through fragmentation and division, exhibits the attributes of the positive use. This system, or this system, or… or… or… or… The commonalities are reinforced by the identification of the disjunctive synthesis operating upon the socius, that is, the body without organs relative to macroscale historico-political systems. The negative use of the disjunctive organizes a unitary body atop the socius, enforcing a judgment of God – but the positive use would entail a break-up of this unitary body, the slippage of the organs into different arrangements and mutant hybrids.

Things get even more uncanny when we consider the Marxist core to Anti-Oedipus: that capital is the force that goes to work on the socius, breaking apart the negative use of the disjunctive imposed by the despotic state and pushing things towards cosmic schizophrenia – the instantiation of the positive use in the form of an immense, frightening singularity.

In “The Greek State,” Nietzsche also takes issue with Wagner’s On State and Religion—another manuscript that Nietzsche read while in Tribschen—which the latter had recently composed at the behest of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. There Wagner accounts for the emergence of the state as from a Hobbesian “fear of violence,” which leads to a “contract whereby the units seek to save themselves from mutual violence, through a little practice of restraint.” While Nietzsche concurred that the state of nature was one of bellum omnium contra omnes (GSt, 170), he disagreed with the idea that the state arose through a contract. He instead saw the state as originating from a “conqueror with the iron hand,” who “suddenly, violently, and bloodily” takes control of a yet-unformed population and forces it into a hierarchical society (GSt, 168). [54]

[…]

In “The Greek State,” Nietzsche concurred with the Hobbesian view of the state of nature being a bellum omnium contra omnes. But he did not account for its birth in a contract. Instead, as we just saw, he located thebirth of the “cruel tool” of the state in the iron “conquerors.” Indeed, these conquerors are themselves, on Nietzsche’s account, the state. Yet the “ignominious” birth of the state is justified as a means to genius and culture. “Nature”—we see the influence of Romanticism on Nietzsche’s early thought here—had instilled in the conqueror the state-creating instinct so that she might achieve “her salvation in appearance in the mirror of genius.” The “dreadful” birth of the state, whose monuments include “devastated lands, ruined towns, savage men, consuming hatred of nations,” is justified by nature because it serves as a means to genius. “The state appears before it proudly and calmly: leading the magnificently blossoming woman, Greek society, by the hand” (GSt, 169).

While Nietzsche’s genealogy of the state claims to be more realistic than the “fanciful,” in his own words, account of the social contract tradition, this does not imply that on his account the state cannot be justified. Of course there is a difference between normative and descriptive claims here: over the course of their writings, Hobbes and indeed Rousseau gave quite detailed accounts of the history of the state they understood to be at odds with the normative ideals they were recommending, and the social contract theorists are often thought of as having tailored their state of nature to justify the type of state they were advocating. But Nietzsche is here rejecting both their descriptive—how the state came into being—and normative claims—how the birth of the state can be justified.

The state, for Nietzsche, is justified because it opens up a space within which culture, through genius, can for the first time flourish. There are a number of elements to this claim. First, that the time and energy used to defend oneself in the “war of all against all” is redirected, within a pacified society, toward more artistic and cultural pursuits. Nietzsche explains that once states have been founded everywhere, the bellicose urge gets concentrated into “less frequent” yet altogether much stronger “bolts of thunder and flashes of lightning” of “dreadful clouds of war between nations.” Thus, much as it was for Hobbes, the “state of nature” gets transferred to the interstate level. In the meantime, however, the “concentrated effect of that bellum, turned inward, gives society time to germinate and turn green everywhere, so that it can let radiant blossoms of genius sprout forth as soon as warmer days come.” In other words, the energy that was used to simply stay alive in the individual war of all against all gets redirected, once encased in and protected by the new state, either collectively toward wars against other nations or, in the intermediary, toward satisfying a “new world of necessities”—namely, culture (GSt, 170).

The two interrelated justifications for the state—genius and culture— come together in the figure of the first genius—the military genius. Since the beasts of prey were organized on a “war footing,” the first type of state, even the “archetype” of the state, is the military state, and the first genius is a military genius. The first work of art is the state itself and its constitution; Nietzsche mentions the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus—a thought borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt. As a military state, the first state therefore divides itself into hierarchical military castes, and this “warlike society” necessarily takes the form of a pyramidal structure with a large slave-class bottom stratum (GSt, 172). [56-57]

As with all things, however, the state decays. For Nietzsche this appears in the time of the Kulturstaat, the modern state that treats its subjects as mere means to furthering the cause of “existing institutions”. “However loudly the state may proclaim its services to cultures, it furthers culture in order to further itself.” The state also loses what Nietzsche regarded as a sense of excitement regarding its function: mass bureaucracy and the dreary affairs of parliament tore from the governing institutions the “ancient Isis veil”. In an aphorism from Human, All Too Human, the cause of modern decline is highlighted: “modern democracy is the historical form of the state.”

Cue the transformation into what Drochon refers to as Nietzsche’s “postmodern state”:

Nietzsche concludes by proclaiming “with certainty” that “distrust of all government” will result from the “uselessness and destructiveness of these short-winded struggles,” and will “impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to do away with the concept of the state, to abolish the distinction between public and private.” Instead, an “invention more suited to their purpose than the state was will gain victory over the state.” “Private companies” (Privatgesellschaften) will “step by step absorb the business of the state,” including those activities that are the “most resistant remainder of what was formerly the work of the government”: protecting “the private person from the private person.”

This marks another point of at least partial convergence with Proudhon, who also foresaw the unwinding of social and political relations into the hurried networks of economic exchange. He wrote in the General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century that

…if I could make a contract with all, as I can with some; if all could renew it among themselves, if each group of citizens, as a town, county, province, corporation, company, etc., formed by a like contract, and considered as a moral person, could thereafter, and always by a similar contract, agree with every and all other groups, it would be the same as if my own will were multiplied to infinity. I should be sure that the law thus made on all questions in the Republic, from millions of different initiatives, would never be anything but my law; and if this new order of things were called government, it would be my government.

Thus the principle of contract, far more than that of authority, would bring about the union of producers, centralize their forces, and assure the unity and solidarity of their interests.

The system of contracts, substituted for the system of laws, would constitute the true government of the man and of the citizen; the true sovereignty of the people, the Republic.

Speaking of state decay, demotic chaos and long-term political cycles, Peter Turchin has written a brief-but-interesting response to Tyler Cowen’s recent “No, Fascism Can’t Happen Here”. He ultimately reaches the same conclusion as Cowen via a different route, but his final note is telling: “In my opinion, the greatest danger for us today (and into the 2020s) is not the rise of a Hitler, but rather a Second American Civil War.” The 2020s thread is picked up elsewhere.

Also keeping up with the troubles is Chris Shaw on zombie politics, which moves from the fragmentation and conflict internal to the dominant political structures towards a Carsonian-informed look at potential leverages for Exit. In other words, ideas that move in the same waters as Nietzsche’s postmodern state and Proudhon’s contract government.